Pros: Performance to price ratio is good, comes with various connectivity options and appealing design.

Cons: Does not offer much room for internal upgrades

The XPS 8300 is powered by a brand new 3.4GHz Intel Core i7-2600 CPU in its all-white casing. It comes with 8 GB of DDR3-1333 memory, the Sandy Bridge CPU helps it make short work on some tests. This version looks similar to the previous versions. It has very similar glossy black front face and on the sides is matte black. It is stylish than its Inspiron Siblings and comes with chrome colored ring around the bezel. It also updated its interior to allow more room for expansion but you also need to take into account the 460W power supply in case you want to make upgrades on the GPU nature.

It has space for extra hard drive over the 1TB, 7,200rpm drive, three PCIe x1 cards and another optical drive aside from the dual layer DVD +/- RW. The single miniPC card slot, single PCIe x16 graphics cards slot of the and four DIMM slots of the system is packed by components, the 1 GB ATI Radeon High Definition Graphics card, 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi card and 8GB memory. You can find eight USB 2.0 ports, HDMI, eSATA and audio ports from the outside. However, it does not have USB 3.0 that is more consumer-oriented.

It also comes with few pieces of pre-loaded software. This includes McAfee Internet Security software with thirty day subscription, as well as the Microsoft Office 2012 started. Office is functional for basic editing of documents. The system also offers the Stage launcher of Dell that hangs above the desktop. This makes sense on touch screen computers you can hide it at least. It also has an app called Cozi which is a family scheduling calendar.

The XPS 8300 hard drive performance was stellar. It has 2TB available space that could take awhile before it gets filled. There is also a room for one more drive but since the case is cramped and its hard drive bay is mounted sideways, it may be necessary for you to remove the graphics and other cables in the way when you install it. It comes with four SATA ports on the motherboard and can support RAID 0 and RAID 1.